No Justice in the Racist Capitalist System

Workers
Revolution Will
Avenge Trayvon Martin

“We are all Trayvon Martin!” Demonstrators march in Harlem,
July 14, to protest acquittal of racist vigilante George
Zimmerman who murdered Trayvon Martin. (Photo: Associated Press)

Mobilize Workers Power to Shut Down “Stop & Frisk”!
For the Right of Armed Black Self-Defense!

The image of Trayvon Martin in his hoodie will remain forever
etched in the memory of this generation of youth and many
others – as were Emmett Till and Medgar Evers for earlier
generations – as the symbol of unrelenting racist terror in
America. We will never forget how Trayvon was lynched by a
bigoted, hate-filled vigilante, for the “crime” of walking
while black. And then again in the courts where
prosecution, defense, judge and jury worked together to
produce a legal lynching.

“The whole damn system is guilty” chant demonstrators at
protests around the country. Damn right, and that system is capitalism.
As capitalist politicians seek to exploit his memory to push
their reactionary agendas, Trayvon’s legacy to us is the
challenge to bury this inhuman regime that produces endless
poverty, racism and war. We the working people and oppressed,
without whose labor the system could not function, are its
gravediggers. Our task is to fight for workersrevolution
to avenge Trayvon and all the victims of racist terror.

When Trayvon Martin was murdered in Sanford, Florida in
February of last year at the age of 17 by racist vigilante and
wannabe cop George Zimmerman, a wave of anger swept the
country as millions expressed their outrage. Black families
felt a cold chill, fearing that their son or brother could be
next to die. Then, when Zimmerman was declared “not guilty” on
July 13 after a grotesque parody of a trial, in which Trayvon
was murdered all over again, tens of thousands took to the
streets to protest the racist verdict.

Across the U.S., young people, older people, black, white,
Latino came out to denounce this abomination. The day after
the verdict was announced, thousands marched in New York City
stopping traffic and shutting down Times Square shouting, “We
are all Trayvon Martin.” As some continued north to Harlem,
police arrested 14. In Los Angeles protesters occupied the
Interstate 10 freeway and then marched onto Crenshaw Boulevard
where L.A. police shot into the crowd with rubber bullets. A
week later, protests were held in over 100 cities nationwide.

You couldn’t miss the message sent by the acquittal in the
Florida trial. A racist killer stalks and murders an unarmed
black teenager walking home with a soft drink and candy, and
the killer gets away with it: this is a declaration of
open season on young African American men. Young people
came forward to make their first speech in public, saying “I
feel like this puts a bulls-eye right on my back.” Many felt
it in their gut: the verdict is an indictment of a racist
injustice system that sends millions of black youth to prison
while letting racist murderers go free.

At New York’s Union Square on Sunday, July 14, protesters
joined the Internationalist contingent in chanting “Trayvon’s
dead, Zimmerman’s free, that’s what they call democracy.” And
again the next day as we marched on the courts at Foley Square
chanting, “Racist system – another black victim.” At a rally
on 125th Street in Harlem, people expressed their appreciation
for Internationalist Group signs saying “Stop Racist Murder
from Afghanistan to Florida and N.Y.” and “Stop and Frisk =
American Apartheid.”

Anticipating an explosion of anger, police from New York to
California were in full riot mode. President Barack Obama
issued a statement saying “we are a nation of laws, and a jury
has spoken.” But people wouldn’t shut up. After nights of
angry protest in black areas of Oakland and Los Angeles, Obama
went before television cameras, again calling to accept the
jury’s verdict, adding “that’s how our system works.” But this
time he spoke in personal terms of the experience of young
black men facing hostility and suspicion.

Many older African Americans said they appreciated the
recognition from the White House of the continuing painful
reality of what Obama timidly called “racial disparities.”
Even as he claimed “things are getting better,” despite all
evidence to the contrary, he was forced to admit “It doesn’t
mean that we’re in a postracial society,” as was widely
proclaimed following the election of the first black
president. But this kind of “I feel your pain” talk
reminiscent of Bill Clinton left even many of his supporters
dissatisfied.

Obama was right about one thing: “that’s how our system
works” – the murderous system he represents and presides
over. In this case, even a liberal black commentator
like Charles Blow has to admit that “The Whole System Failed
Trayvon Martin” (New York Times, 16 July). But what is
that system? Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law wasn’t even
used in this case, while police procedure and rigged court
proceedings are only part of it. It was racist American
capitalism that lynched Trayvon, and then lynched him again
in the courtroom.

From the time of slavery, the bedrock on which it was
founded, the U.S. capitalist economy has claimed countless
black lives and will continue to do so until it is swept away.
The Supreme Court’s cancellation last month of the key section
of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, part of a general rolling back
of the limited gains of the civil rights movement, is part of
that system. So is the municipal bankruptcy of black Detroit,
principally the result of the closure of the auto plants in
the 1980s, leading to mass unemployment of black workers and
vast population loss.

Speaking for the IG at the July 14 Harlem rally, Charlie
Morán, an immigrant worker, said a TV reporter had questioned
our sign saying “Trayvon Martin Was Lynched – No Justice in
the Capitalist Courts.” Voices in the crowd exclaimed, “Yes!”
One cried out, “that’s what they’re doing to black boys.” Our
comrade continued:

“No question about it, legal lynching is what this
is all about, in the U.S.A., and it has been for the past
three hundred years. Even if we have a black president in the
White House, nothing has changed. Democrats, Republicans,
they’re not friends of the working class, they’re not friends
of Latinos, of black people. Also Mumia Abu-Jamal is still in
prison. He was 30 years on death row. We need to mobilize
power, the power of the working class to stop this legal
lynching, to stop the murder of our black brothers and
sisters, of our Latino brothers and sisters.”

At the same rally, Sándor John, speaking on
behalf of the CUNY Internationalist Clubs, recalled the 1857
Dred Scott case, of a slave who was taken to a so-called “free
state” and then sued for his freedom:

“The Supreme Court not only said it was ruling
against him, but he had no right to sue in the courts. Those
Supreme Court lynchers in black robes said, and I quote, that
black men had ‘no rights which the white man was bound to
respect.’ Trayvon Martin’s case shows that this is still true
today. And it will be true until we overthrow this capitalist
system.”

Racist Vigilante, Racist Police, Racist
Town, Racist Courts

At the trial and in recent coverage in the “mainstream”
(bourgeois) media, there has been a cover-up of the racism of
the killer vigilante. When the 911 tapes of Zimmerman’s
call-in to the police were released, everyone could hear him
saying that his prey was “suspicious,” “up to no good,” “on
drugs or something.” He complained that “these assholes always
get away,” adding under his breath, “f---king punks.” But more
than just profiling anyone who in his fevered brain looked
like a “bad guy,” Zimmerman has it in for African American
men.

In our earlier article (“Lynch
Law U.S.A.: State Defends Murderer of Trayvon Martin,” The
Internationalist, May 2012), we noted the killer’s
frequent 911 calls about “suspicious” black people (46 calls
in the previous 15 months). The Miami Herald (13 March
2012) reported that “Zimmerman went door-to-door asking
residents to be on the lookout, specifically referring to
young black men who appeared to be outsiders.” A black
resident said he “fit the stereotype that [Zimmerman] emailed
around,” so he just stayed in his house for fear of being
chased.

The Sanford police, who eagerly bought Zimmerman’s lies that
he killed Martin in self-defense and let the killer walk, are
also notorious for a racist double standard. Black residents
said distrust of the police “had been fueled by what they
described as mistreatment and the agency’s failure to
thoroughly investigate the shooting deaths of many young black
men” (New York Times, 17 June). Like in 2010 when the
Sanford police waited seven weeks to arrest a lieutenant’s son
who beat up a homeless man, Zimmerman was not charged for 44
days after killing Trayvon.

Resentment of the police is natural, given the town’s
segregationist past. “This has been a slave town forever,” a
resident told the new black police chief brought in to ease
tensions. There was once a black town next door, Goldsboro,
until Sanford took it over in 1911. For decades, Sanford was a
“sundown town,” where African Americans were forbidden to
live, facing violence and even lynching if caught there after
dark. In 1946, Jackie Robinson was driven out of town by death
threats when he arrived for spring training with the Brooklyn
Dodgers’ minor league team.

Yet although race and racism were at the heart of the
stalking and murder of a 17-year-old black youth by a white
vigilante, none of this came up in the trial. Trial judge
Debra Nelson ruled out any mention of “racial profiling,” even
though the charge was second-degree murder, which is defined
as killing with spite, hatred or ill will. And even though
tapes of Zimmerman’s 911 calls about suspicious persons were
admitted as evidence, 100% complaining about blacks, the
prosecution never used them and never referred to his blatant
racial profiling in its closing arguments.

While the state deliberately ducked the issue of racism,
leaving even some bourgeois media incredulous, Zimmerman’s
counsel Mark O’Mara is a foaming racist who tried every smear
and distortion he could get away with to put the victim
on trial. Portraying Trayvon as a violent aggressor, he used a
foam dummy as a stand-in for Zimmerman, crushing it with his
large body, and raining blows on it, cracking its head
repeatedly on the imaginary concrete, supposedly representing
the 158-pound Trayvon Martin pummeling 250-pound George
Zimmerman!

This fictional display purported to show what might have
happened to produce the supposed scratches on Zimmerman’s head
shown in “enhanced” (i.e., doctored) photographs, which a
medical examiner dismissed as “very insignificant.” Yet this
surreal outrage was permitted by the judge and not objected to
by the prosecution. When Rachel Jeantel testified about her
phone conversation with Trayvon as he was trying to get away
from Zimmerman, she clearly had not been prepared by the
prosecution and was then ridiculed by the defense (and on the
Internet).

The special prosecutor in the Zimmerman case, Angela Corey,
also prosecuted a black woman, Marissa Alexander, who got
10-20 years in prison for firing a pistol in the air trying to
ward off her dangerous husband, against whom she had a
restraining order. Yet white vigilante Zimmerman kills an
innocent black youth and goes free. The jury, too, was racist,
and had not one African American among the six women. That
alone is prima facie evidence of discrimination in a city that
is 30 percent black. But the state accepted this outrage.

During the impaneling, when one potential juror said Trayvon
should not have been out at night, reflecting racist opinion
in this “sundown town,” the judge overruled the prosecution’s
objection and seated her. Another juror, B37, called the
peaceful protests over the killing “riots,” yet she was seated
without objection from the state. After the verdict, B37 told
journalist Anderson Cooper that Zimmerman was driven to kill
by “vandalism,” that he “profiled” Trayvon because of his
hoodie, and that Trayvon as well was “responsible” for his own
death.

Throughout, not only did the prosecution avoid the key issues
and really damning evidence against Zimmerman, it made so many
“mistakes” that the inescapable conclusion is that it never
tried to win the case. Instead of hammering at Zimmerman’s use
of cop talk calling Martin “the suspect,” the prosecution
dropped it when an officer said it didn’t bother her. When
another cop testified that he found Zimmerman’s claim of
self-defense believable, which is inadmissible as it is up to
the jury to decide on credibility, the prosecution let it
pass.

The fact is that the state never wanted this case, taking six
weeks to charge Zimmerman with anything, and only sought to
appease the outcry. Lead prosecutor Corey, appointed after
weeks of massive protests, said as much following the verdict:
“What we promised to do was get this case in front of a jury,
and give Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman their day in
court.” How wonderfully even-handed! Of course, there is a
difference: Trayvon is dead and never got to speak, while his
murderer (whose lies were repeated by all sides) is free.

In fact, George Zimmerman was not really put on trial,
Trayvon Martin was. All parties in this travesty of a trial
(defense, police, judge, prosecution and jury) worked together
to convict the innocent, unarmed black youth of his own death
and to absolve the killer who was guilty as hell of
first-degree (premeditated) murder. Of course, police gun down
African Americans and Latinos with impunity all the time. The
only reason there was even a mock trial here was due to
protests, and because sectors of the ruling class want to
reinforce the state’s monopoly of armed force.

Gun Control Kills Blacks

Thousands marched on Times Square in New York City July 14 to
protest not guilty verdict.
(Photo: Michael Fleshman/Flickr)

And after the verdict, they’re still at it. The bourgeois
liberal establishment is trying to channel outrage into a
campaign against Florida’s “Stand Your Ground Law” and similar
statutes everywhere. And since that law was never invoked in
this trial, they claim it “colored” the proceedings and take
aim at the right of self-defense generally. “Certainly it [the
Zimmerman case] is about race,” admits a New York Times
(15 July editorial), even though that subject was banned from
the trial. But what’s key, it argues, is to get guns out of
the hands of the populace.

The population – black, white or other – would then be left
defenseless, while in fact it is the police who gun down far,
far more black and Latino young men than vigilantes. Obama
remarked in his July 19 appearance before the TV cameras, “I
just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and
armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do
we actually think that he would have been justified in
shooting Mr. Zimmerman?” Our answer is Trayvon was being
stalked by a racist potential killer who was armed and
dangerous, and if the hunted youth feared for his life and was
armed, he would absolutely have been justified in shooting
Zimmerman.

In that case it is virtually certain that the black youth
would be tried and convicted of murder, no matter what the
law, because of the pervasive racism of American society. As
for a supposed “duty to retreat,” if Trayvon had sought to
flee it’s a good bet that Zimmerman would have put a bullet in
his back. This case was never about self-defense, it was a
cold-blooded execution. The killer got out of his vehicle with
his gun to make sure that this “punk” didn’t “get
away.” Facing threatening racists, any black person anywhere
has the right of self-defense.

Liberals, black and white, call on people to “retreat” and
ramp up calls for tighter gun control while Trayvon has been
demonized in the trial and the press for seeking to defend
himself against a racist vigilante. As we have stressed
before, gun control kills blacks (see “Who
Controls the Guns?” The Internationalist No.
34, March-April 2013). Malcolm X was more than right when he
said black people have the right to defend themselves “by any
means necessary.” We noted in our earlier article about
Trayvon Martin:

“[T]o call for the capitalist state to control
firearms … is to suggest that the police are or could somehow
be neutral or even favorable to the black, Latino, Asian and
immigrant population when they are in fact the greatest force
of oppression. From the White Citizens Councils of the 1960s
to ‘community watch’ groups today, vigilantes get their power
from their connection to the state. And following the Monroe,
North Carolina NAACP and Bogalusa, Louisiana Deacons for
Defense1
in the 1950s and ’60s, to fight them we stand for the
right of black armed self-defense.”

Currently Democrat Jesse Jackson is calling to boycott all
things Florida to induce the state legislature to overturn the
“Stand Your Ground” law, while Democrat Al Sharpton is calling
to put pressure on the Justice Department to charge Zimmerman
with civil rights violations. These are deliberate attempts to
divert protest away from the struggle against racist terror,
which is centrally the work of the police, and to channel
anger into support for the Obama administration. This will do
nothing to win justice for Trayvon Martin and will likely lead
to a demoralizing dead end.

Calling on Democrat Obama, the commander-in-chief of
murderous U.S. imperialism – who wants NYPD chief Ray (“Stop
and Frisk”) Kelly to head the Homeland Security department and
who has called to accept the verdict of the Florida trial – to
bring federal charges against Zimmerman is not just a
diversion but downright ludicrous. Moreover, the law itself
and the courts’ current interpretation of everything from
busing for school integration and “affirmative action”
programs to the voting rights law would make it practically
impossible to convict without an explicit statement of racist
intent by Zimmerman.

Already in 2010, Obama’s Justice Department announced it was
not bringing federal charges against the murderous NYPD cops
who gunned down Sean Bell in a hail of 50 bullets on his
wedding morning in 2006. (As a candidate Barack Obama in 2008
also called to “respect the verdict” of the judge who absolved
the killer cops.) Nor have the feds taken any action on
flagrant frame-up of the Central Park Five, railroaded to jail
for 14 years on bogus rape charges amid a media-induced racist
hysteria. One of the Five, Kharey Wise, spoke at the July 14
Harlem protest.

What Is to Be Done?

Internationalist contingent in march on Foley Square in New
York, July 15. (Internationalist
photo)

The lesson is reaching quite a few people that “black faces
in high places” change nothing essential about how this
country operates. So now we have a black president in the
highest place in American politics. Yet as an older African
American demonstrator told The Internationalist at a
July 20 NYC rally at 1 Police Plaza: “Obama’s talking about
people’s sons and all the while his drones are killing
dark-skinned children in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” while
“here we are in the shadow of this huge perpetrator of death”
against black people in New York, the NYPD.

Around the corner stand the massive court buildings in Foley
Square where radical lawyer Lynne Stewart was effectively
condemned to die in prison. Meanwhile, Obama’s government
wages a deadly vendetta against Bradley Manning and Edward
Snowden for telling the truth about U.S. war crimes and
massive spy-agency surveillance. Yet at a protest rally on
July 15, a leader of the Workers World Party (WWP) called to
hold Obama’s top cop Eric Holder to his word about a federal
investigation. In response to this and chants of “No
justice, no peace,” Class Struggle Education Workers activist
Marjorie Stamberg remarked:

“There is no justice in this system. We only have
faith in our own independent organizing of the working class
and the oppressed. We’re the ones who have the power – TWU,
UFT, 1199, all the unions of the working people, the students,
the parents, all of us, we have the power to stop the
wheels of production. We need a revolution, a workers
revolution – that is how we are going to get justice for
Trayvon Martin and all the victims of this racist capitalist
system.”

If the job of the black Democrats and the liberal civil
rights establishment is to patch up illusions in the racist
injustice system, opportunist left groups see their task as
tailing after those same forces. Various pseudo-socialist
groups are a bit queasy about openly calling for gun control,
knowing full well it would strengthen the cops. So the WWP and
the International Socialist Organization call for support to
the Dream Defenders, a largely black and Latino youth group
that has occupied the Florida governor’s office and which
joins the liberal Democrats in calling for repeal of “Stand
Your Ground” and to reform police procedures.

Given the depth of the anger, some left groups have struck a
more radical posture than usual. Thus Workers World
(25 July) headlines, “No justice for Trayvon Martin? No peace
for capitalist system!” trying to give a leftist spin to
Sharpton’s “no justice, no peace” slogan. But what does this
mean in practice? The answer: “While fighting for a socialist
future is the goal of many revolutionaries, we must continue
to monitor how the current righteous anger over the Zimmerman
verdict will play out in the coming days, weeks and months and
strategize on how best to help channel this righteous anger
into a broad, organized fightback.” Translation: stay tuned,
WWP is figuring out how to build another of its endless
“coalitions” with Democrats (the People’s Power Assemblies
being the current favorite).

The Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) has been
popularizing the slogans “the whole damn system is guilty” and
“revolution, nothing less.” But the RCP is cagey about what
that system is: since their political strategy is to ally with
liberals who might be scared off by too-strident denunciations
of capitalism. In line with liberal “discourse” they talk of
white supremacy in terms of ideology and discrimination,
separate from the material roots of black oppression. As for
the “revolution,” that boils down to “getting into BA,”
meaning Bob Avakian Thought, the pompous declamations of a
megalomaniacal Stalinist-cultist jerk. The radical rhetoric
masks what is at bottom warmed-over liberal idealism.

The oppression of African Americans is not due to the
undifferentiated domination of white people in general, or
simply the result of racist ideas. The ideology of
racism emerged from the material oppression of the
black population, going back to slavery and continuing – as
Northern capitalists came to terms with their Southern
brethren, betraying the Civil War’s promise of black freedom –
to the present day. It is the product of capitalist rule
which can only survive by dividing the working class and all
the exploited, conceding a few privileges to petty-bourgeois
and “labor-aristocratic” sectors, and then using those to
foster massive racism. This poisonous false consciousness must
be fought wherever it appears, but it can only be eliminated
through multiracial class struggle and sweeping away its
material basis by workers revolution.

Both liberals and many self-proclaimed socialists and
communists have dealt with the effects of black
oppression, raising an exclusively democratic program to
eliminate discrimination without touching the fundamentals of
capitalism which forcibly confine the descendants of slaves to
the bottom of U.S. society. Yet every time there has been an
advance in democratic rights, sooner or later a new mechanism
of subordination is instituted. After the abolition of slavery
in the Civil War, the brief democratic period of Radical
Reconstruction was soon replaced by rigid “Jim Crow”
segregation, which lasted almost a century, up until the
1960s.

When the segregationist Southern laws were overturned as the
result of the mass social struggle of the Civil Rights
movement, this did not change the hard realities for black
residents of the impoverished ghettos of the North, where
inequality was not de jure but written into the
economic laws of capitalist society. When the ghettos
erupted in massive upheavals, these were put down with
military force, and soon the racist capitalist rulers hit on a
new method of keeping the black people down. A petty-bourgeois
layer would be fostered and even a tiny black bourgeois elite,
epitomized by Obama, while the mass of poor blacks,
particularly young black men, would be criminalized.

This has led to a huge expansion of the prison system,
currently holding 2.4 million prisoners (plus tens of
thousands of immigrants in concentration camps awaiting
deportation), while millions more ex-prisoners are denied
basic rights. This diabolical system, in which up to a third
of young black men are in prison, on parole or probation, was
particularly aided by racist anti-drug laws. The basic purpose
is social control. As Michelle Alexander writes in her book The
New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness (New Press, 2012):

“[T]he most important parallel between mass
incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define
the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a
primary function of any racial caste system is to define the
meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to
be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be
black (second class citizen). Today Mass Incarceration defines
the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially
black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black.”

In today’s America, the more enlightened bourgeois
ideologists admit that race is a social construction, not a
biological reality, at the same time as they argue as if race
is some kind of eternal category that “causes” racial
oppression. For Marxists, Alexander’s observation underscores
the bitter fact that since black oppression is part of the
material reality of capitalism in this country, the ruling
class has repeatedly found new forms of control and
subjugation of the African American population, whose struggle
for genuine liberation proves, time and again, to be
incompatible with a society based on
exploitation.

A working-class fight against the criminalization of
black and Latino youth is urgently needed. That includes
mobilizing the power of labor, African Americans, Latinos and
all defenders of democratic rights to shut down the
police practice of racial profiling known as “stop and frisk”
which has led to 4
million arbitrary searches of New Yorkers. The racist
intent of this policy is so blatant that even though 87
percent of those stopped are black and Latino, plutocrat mayor
Bloomberg complains that not enough blacks and Latinos
were stopped!

A small taste of workers action against racist police terror
occurred in October 2010 when Local 10 of the International
Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) shut down the port of
Oakland, California for a day to protest the slap-on-the-wrist
manslaughter conviction of transit cop Johannes Mehserle who murdered
young black worker Oscar Grant on New Year’s Day 2009 (see “ILWU
Shuts Ports Demanding Justice for Oscar Grant,” Revolution
No. 8, April 2011).

A film
about the Oscar Grant murder (Fruitvale Station) was
released in the very week that George Zimmerman was acquitted,
heightening the sense of outrage in the San Francisco Bay Area
and elsewhere . Hopefully protests over the racist lynching of
Trayvon Martin will continue. Yet to have an effect, the key
is the political direction and leadership of such protests. As
Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton push gun control, various
reformist groups that call themselves socialist seek liberal
allies by calling (as does Michelle Alexander) for a “new
civil rights movement.” This will solve nothing – the old
civil rights movement came to a dead end precisely because, in
accepting the limits of capitalist society and reform
politics, it could not rip out the roots of black oppression.

In a classic example of this kind of dead-end perspective,
some black nationalist and liberal groups have joined with
Jesse Jackson in appealing to “Boycott Florida,” as if not
buying Florida orange juice would change anything. This also
presumes the problem is just Florida, when the point is that
in NYC and the Northeast as well as the Deep South, the
Midwest and everywhere else in this country, racist oppression
and terror are the norm, not the exception. So what is the
population to do, boycott everything in the country: no more
California grapes, Iowa corn or Kansas wheat?

The legal lynching of Trayvon Martin is the system
functioning as it is supposed to. The fundamental task of the
courts and cops is to maintain and defend the property and
power of the social class that owns this society: the
capitalists. To unleash the power of the working class that
can bury capitalism requires a political struggle to free
labor,blacks and all the oppressed from the
shackles chaining them to the Democratic Party and to
build the nucleus of a multiracial revolutionary workers
party.

As one of the Internationalist speakers at the July 14 Harlem
rally said:

“I want to be frank here. It’s not just Florida.
What about Ramarley Graham, where was he? In this city. What
about Abner Louima? Tortured by the police, by the racist
NYPD. What about Amadou Diallo? What about Alberta Spruill?
What about Sean Bell? What about Anthony Baez? It’s not just
Florida, it’s not just the Deep South, it’s not just Up South
up here, it’s all around this country. So we need to mobilize
a greater power than their power of terror, and their dirty
imperialist wars, and their filthy racist murder machine,
whether they be in white sheets, blue uniforms or the black
robes of the of the Supreme Court of death. That power is the
power of the working class, to overthrow this racist
capitalist system. Only then will we begin to get justice.” ■

1.
The Deacons successfully faced down the KKK in the racist
bastion of Bogalusa, Lousiana. See “Bogalusa
1965:
Deacons for Defense,” The Internationalist
No. 34, March-April 2013 and the vivid portrayal in the
film Deacons for Defense (2003), starring Forest
Whitaker and Ossie Davis.